Pages

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

The Measure of a Hunter by Norman Strung

It's finally September and the Missouri archery season opens in just 6 days. I'm heading into my fourth year of hunting and I couldn't be more excited. For months now I've been shooting my bow to build up those back muscles and tighten up my groups. I've spent hot Saturday afternoons banging through tick infested brush looking for any clues that could help me cross paths with more deer this fall. The time in between has be spent pouring over satellite images and topo maps and logging waypoints that I've taken in the field to try to put together a few pieces of the puzzle. I feel as though I'm starting to figure out this elaborate game of hide and seek.

As one would expect, my first three seasons were filled with highs and lows. Hiking into my spot and shuffling up a tree with my climber only to realize that I had forgotten to attach my bow to the hoist rope. The bloodtrail of the first descent buck to ever cross my path that lead to nothing but the sickening heartbreak of an unrecovered, injured animal. Cutting down a small tree on the family property to recover my first fox squirrel that became lodged in the crook of a limb. And just last year, the unforgettable mile-long, uphill drag to the truck with my first archery whitetail.

While the learning process has been frustrating at times, all of those experiences have created lasting memories and taught me valuable lessons that I can hopefully someday pass on.

Recently I stumbled across an article written by Norman Strung in the January 1985 edition of Field and Stream. The article, I believe, does a great job of reminding us that hunting isn't just about filling our tags. Every outing is a learning experience, and sometimes the take-home for the day is a lesson in contentment. Hunting is about spending time in the outdoors and making memories that are going to last longer than the meat in the freezer and the antlers on the wall.

We mature as hunters as we mature as human beings, and the process is
no less complex than the journey that leads us from childhood to
adulthood. I can still recall my first year with a gun. I was fourteen
then, with a 16-gauge bolt-action shotgun and an unbridled blood lust.
Throughout that fall, I would venture from the family’s summer home
every Saturday and Sunday at dawn, and walk the woods all day long, a
boy possessed.My intent was to bag limits of grouse, quail, pheasants, rabbits,
squirrels, raccoons, opossums, ducks, geese, and even crows and fox.
This fantasy of mayhem was not blind of reason, however. I couldn’t
articulate it then, but I equated being a hunter and sportsman with all
the elusive qualities of manhood: courtliness, confidence, knowledge,
and above all, freedom. It seemed obvious that the shortest, most direct
route to that state of grace was to bring home limit after limit of
game. After all, what better proof existed that one was a good and able
hunter?There is, fortunately, a law of inverse proportions at work in the
woods when you are young, inexperienced, and bloodthirsty. Although I
would have decimated Long Island’s game populations had I been given the
opportunity, my aimless wanderings, flock shooting, and sky blasting
resulted in a season’s bag of one rabbit and one quail. I came to the
painful conclusion that I was not a very good hunter.The next year proved better. I had begun to learn from experience
where and when game was likely to be found. I discovered that the
twilight hours of dawn and dusk might be good for trout fishing, but
that quail generally stayed under cover until the sun burned off the
frost and went back to their roosts around sundown. I noted that rabbits
preferred clearing edges rather than deep woods, and that grouse tended
to hole up where laurels grew. Occasionally, I shouldered my gun fast
enough, and shot straight enough, to bag a few.Sadly, I had no mentors during those green years. None of my family,
nor friends of my family, hunted. But I did have a role model, a man of
casual acquaintance who lived next door. He had a pair of sleek bird
dogs kenneled behind his home. He carried a fine, engraved shotgun from
his house to his car when he left on Saturday mornings. And soon after
he returned, a brace of mallards or pheasants or two quail and a rabbit,
were usually hanging below the eaves of his garage, catching the low,
fall sunlight like a still life by the Old Masters.One Friday in late November, it snowed heavily. Then the snow changed
briefly to rain and it got bitterly cold. I went hunting the following
day and surprised a small covey of quail in a flattened, white field,
scratching through the crust for ragweed seeds.I can still recall my elation at the stroke of good fortune. There
was generally no place for the quail to hide, and the shooting was wide
open. I took my first double ever from the covey rise, then hunted each
single down until I reached my limit; that too, a first. In the
afternoon, six quail turned slowly on the string that was secured under
the eave of our garage.I waited idly until my neighbor returned, and then pretended to
fiddle with the quail and the string. I waved to him as he kenneled his
dogs. He saw the birds and smiled, returning my wave. He stepped into
our yard.“Did pretty well today, son,” he said through pipe-clenching teeth.“Sure did,” I replied, and recounted the circumstances of the hunt.Like the ticking of a clock, each detail removed one weathered
wrinkle around his eyes and mouth. When I was done, his smiling face had
become as flat, featureless, and somber as the crusted snow. He tapped
his pipe thoughtfully on the palm of his hand, gazed at the quail, and
smiled a different smile.“You’re young,” he began, “ and I was too, once. You got your birds,
and you’re proud, and I don’t want to take that away from you. But
someday, when you get a little older, you’ll come to find there’s a
difference between killing and hunting. It’s a distinction that people
who aren’t hunters seldom understand.”I was devastated. A rite of passage that spanned two years and had at
last been successfully run was disqualified in half a minute. If
numbers were not the name of the game, by what yardstick was I to
measure?

I would
like to report that an epiphany occurred that night, or soon after, but
such was not the case. I continued to hunt with a laser focus that
stretched from the barrel of my gun to the game that rose in front of
it. A good day equaled a heavy game pocket.

But I had been sensitized. Long hours in the woods gradually taught
me how to spot hiding rabbits and squirrels by the telltale pinprick of
light in their shiny, black eyes. I concluded that the gift was
advantage enough, and chose to walk them up and flush them, rather than
shoot them where they hid. I once did the same thing with a pheasant on
the ground. I rushed the bird to make it fly before I shot. I missed.Aside from those small gestures, though, I was not tested again until
my early twenties. By then I had entertained and discarded a dozen
friendships with people I had met afield, and had found a handful of
special friends called hunting buddies, with whom strong bonds had been
formed through times good and bad.I was hunting black ducks on Moriches Bay with one of them when a
norwester arrived with the suddenness and power of a hammer blow.We were on a long point, and a raft of at least 1,000 birds lay to
the east. The fierce winds tore loose a sheet of ice that stretched for 3
miles along the western shore of the bay, and as it bore down on the
raft, the birds were forced to move. The wind was so strong that the
only way they could make headway was to fly into the teeth of the gale,
flat on the deck, where backcurrents and eddies broke some of the blow.
Their route took them right over the point where we hid.At first we were astonished as singles, doubles, and small flocks
arrived as if on an assembly line, flying so low that we could touch
some of them with our barrel ends. There was also a short time of
humbling shooting until we figured out that a bird pumping along at 5
miles an hour into a 55-mile-an-hour headwind had to be led the same
distance as one sizzling along at 55 miles an hour on a calm day. But
once we got the lead down, there was no contest, and no sport. We found
each other reluctant to shoot, saying, “ you take this one,” and “poor
devils,” as the confused ducks poured into our decoys.At some point, one of us spoke for both of us and said, “Enough.” We
broke our guns, lay back, and enjoyed the spectacle, leading birds with
our fingers, and yelling “boom.” To this day, when I tell the story,
someone will allow as how we must have been nuts not to take advantage
of such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I recall both of us
feeling uncommonly good later that evening about what we had done.The years went by and I grew in knowledge, experience, and I think,
as a hunter. I acquired fine bird dogs of my own, expensive guns I knew
how to shoot, and I learned the habits of game so well that I rarely
returned from the field empty-handed. But along the way, a curious
transformation took place. Armed with such sure knowledge in my callow
youth, I would have killed all the limits I dreamed of. Yet now, I began
to exercise restraint.Sure, there were times when filling a table with a feast for friends
led me to shoot a limit of ducks or pheasants, and big-game season
represented sustenance as well as sport. But more often than not, I
would swing on the most difficult bird in a covey rise, rather than
taking the sucker shot. When a flock of fidgety mallards swung wide of
the decoys and circled overhead, I would resist the long shot for the
possibility that they might settle down, and treat me to the singular
beauty of a classic toll, approaching the decoys on confident, cupped
wings.I also found that I preferred the company of others with a like mind.
It wasn’t snobbishness or elitism; just a matter of priorities. It
gradually made more sense to enjoy the company of people who could savor
the best of a morning on a marsh, then cap that memory when the bottle
was full, rather than let it overflow with the excess of another two or
three birds that could be bagged in an instant as a foregone conclusion.
I also discovered another common denominator among those I called both
hunter and friend: a mutual reverence for the things we hunted.That one can have reverence and respect for something you are trying
to hunt down is easy to imagine as a contradiction, but I have seen
antelope hunters choose a tough, tricky stalk over an easy one in
exchange for the certainty of a swift, clean kill, and bird hunters who
spent half their afternoon finding a cripple. But no example speaks so
eloquently of this abiding sense of reverence as the time a friend
downed a six-point bull elk that we had hunted hard and well. It was a
perfect shot and a magnificent trophy, yet in that ebullient moment of
deserved triumph, he was moved to briefly touch the carcass and mutter,
“I’m sorry….” It was not a statement of regret, but of humble apology
and thanksgiving to and of a spirit that we both understood perfectly.Upon that cold and windblown hillside, perhaps I arrived at the
estate I first sought as an adolescent in thought and years, but I don’t
really know. It’s like asking me now, at two score and three, if I’ve
finally grown up, and to be honest, I hope I haven’t, because when you
stop growing, you stop living. At that moment of salute to the fallen
elk, a quote ran through my mind. It has been a creed of mine ever
since, and I recall these same words every time I sight down a barrel:“We are measured more as hunters by the things we choose not to shoot, than by those that we do.”